Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1883 — THE BAD BOY. [ARTICLE]

THE BAD BOY.

“Hello, got back again, have you?” said the grocery man to the bad bey, aa he came in the store looking tired, with his clothes soiled and a general appearance of having been sleeping in freight cars with cattle. “Your pa told me he expected you had run away for good and that you might not come back. Where you been ?” “Chicago,” said the boy, as he took out a toad-stabber knife and proceeded to take the ulster off a smoked herring. ’Been playing Prodigal Son, in two sets. But times have changed since that young fellow in the Bible went off on a tear and came back, and the old folks killed a young cow ior him to eat, and fell on his shirt collar and cried down the back of his neck. They don’t receive prodigal sons that way in our ward. They fill a prodigal son’s coat tails full of boots, and he can’t find cold veal enough in the house to make a sandwich.” “I thought your folks were pious and would be inclined to overlook anything,” said the grocery man, as he charged the herring and crackers to the bad boy’s father. “You don’t mean to tell me they went back on the teachings of the good book and warmed your jacket?” “You have guessed it the first time," said the boy. “This prodigal son business is all right in theory, but in practice it’s a dead failure. You see at Sunday-school the lesson was about the prodigal son, and the minister told us all about how the boy took all the money he could scrape up and went awty to a distant country and painted the towns red, and spent his money like a countryman at a circus, and how he took in all the sights, and got broke, and got hungry, and took a job at the stock-yards feeding pigs, and he was so hungry he used to help the pigs eat their rations, and finally he thought of his home, where they had pie, and he went home expecting to be fired out, but his pa was tickled to see him, and set up a free lunch of calf on a half shell, and hugged the boy, and made him feel bully. When we got home pa and ma talked about the lesson, and pa said it was one of the most touching things he ever heard, and told me to think of it, and it would do me good. Well, the more I thought of it the more I felt like trying the prodigal business on, and I told my chum about it, and he said he hadn’t had any vacation, and he would go off prodigaling with me if I would go, and we could see the country, and have a good time, and come back and be received with open arms. Well, we got all our money together, and a brakeman on a freight-train, that goes to church, cause his wife sings in the choir, he hid us in the caboose and we went to Chicago. Oh, my, but we had a good time! I never saw money wither the way it did with us. We eat about twenty times a day, the first two days, and then our appetite left us, because we didn’t have any more money. The first two nights we slept in a 2-shilling lodginghouse, the third night we walked around, and the fourth night we slept in the police-station. When our money was gone half the fun was gone. If a fellow can walk around with money in his pocket he feels good, even if he don’t want to buy anything; but when the money is gone he feels bad and wants to buy lots of things. We waited two days for our brakeman, and when we got on his train he put us on a cattle-car, and it was vile. I traded my collar-button for a postal-card and wrote to pa that the prodigal would put in an appearance at 9 p. m., and for him to prepare to fall on my neck, and to send down to the meat-market for a hind quarter of fatted calf and have plenty of gravy. You wouldn’t believe it, but there was no carriage at the depot, and we had to walk home. I could have overlooked that if there had been anything to eat when I got to the house, but there wasn’t enough for a canary bird. Pa was there, however, and I was just going to hold out my neck for pa to get on to weep when he grabbed it with his hand and came near twisting it off, and then he turned me around and began to play the bass drum on my clothes with his feet I never was so annoyed in all my life, honestly. It was not the treatment I had a right to expect after what they had told me about the prodigal son of ancient times. As quick as I could catch my breath I asked pa what he thought the prodigal son of Bible times would have thought if his pa had mauled him when he came home, and what kind of a story it would have made if it had told about the old man taking him by the neck and kicking him all over the room, instead of falling on his neck and weeping, and giving him a veal pot-pie. Pa said he wasn’t running any old back-number prodigal sons, and he thought his way was the best, and he sent me to bed without any supper. That settled the prodigal business with Hennery. No. more fatted calf for Hank, if you please, ” and the boy got up and shook the herring peelings off his lap. “Well, how did your chum come out ?” asked the grocery man, with much interest. “Oh, he hasn’t come out yet. He is in the lockup,” said the boy. “His ma put the police onto him, and when he showed up they run him into the police station for a tramp. I think we have both demonstrated that this climate does not agree with the prodigal business, and however much they may try to teach us the beauties of such stories, they do not expect us to try to imitate them. When Igo to Chicago after this I shall go in a parlor car, with lunch enough to last me, and a return ticket. I don’t understand it at all. Now I didn’t do half the mean things in Chicago that the Prodigal son of old did in the far-off country, and, yet he got taffy when he got home, and I got my spine broke. It may be all right, but they do things different in the old country, you know.” “If I understand the kind of a prodigal son you are,” said the grocery man, as he sprinkled the floor from a washbasin, preparatory to the semi-annual sweeping out, “you have got even with vour pa before this, for his outrageous treatment. That is, mind you, I ddn’t suggest anything for you to play on him, but from what I know of you, the

account is even up before now. Am 1 right?” “Well, I should remark. Any person who thinks I cannot resent such an insult, makes a mistake as to the sort of a prodigal son I am. We had company at dinner to-day, and pa is always in his element when we have company. He prides himself on his carving. We had a roast of beef, and before it went on the table I took the steel that pa sharpens the carving-knife on, and made two holes right through the roast, and then I took a rawhide whip that pa basted me with once, cut it in two, and run pieces of the rawhide in the holes of the beef. Pa bagan carving with a smile, and asked the minister if he would have his beef rare, or an outside piece. He was bearing gently on the carving knife, when the knife struck the rawhide and it wouldn’t go any further. Pa smiled and said he guessed he had struck a barbed wire fence, and he turned the roast around and cut again, and he struck the rawhide. The minister drummed with his fork and spoke to ma and said ‘we had a splendid meeting last Wednesday night,’ and ma said it was perfectly gorgeous, and pa began to perspire and turn red in the face, and he said some words that would sound better in a brewery, and he tried to gouge off some meat, but it wouldn’t come, and the minister said, ‘ Brother, you seem to be having a monkey and a parrot time with that roast,’and that made pa mad and he said*he could carve his own meat without any sky-pilot’s interference, and ma said, ‘Why, pa, yon should not be impudent,’ and pa said he could whip the butcher that sold him that piece of work ox, and he sent the beef out to the kitchen a»d the company ate cold liver. The girl set- the meat in the icechest, and pretty soon I went down cellar ’cause I didn’t like cold liver, and pulled out the rawhide, and I had all the fatted calf I wanted, and I gave the rest to that lame dog you see me have here a spell ago. Oh, a boy can get enough to eart; if he has got any originality about him. I think if pa would show a Christian spirit, and wear slippers when he kicks me, I would do anything to make it pleasant for him, but when a man wears out huntingboots on his own little prodigal, I think the prodigal is apt to get hard. Don’t you?” The groceryman admitted that perhaps the boy was right, and he raised such a dust sweeping out that the boy coughed, took a few peaches off the top of a basket, and went out whistling, “Home Again, from a Foreign Shore.” —Peck's Sun.